Archive for August, 2003

It’s amazing! A miricle, even! Our cat, Joy, who has been missing for almost two months now simply showed up tonight! Kim saw her in the garage and pursued her out the cat door to the yard where we nabbed her and brought her inside. She went in without a struggle and certainly seemed to recognise us and the other cat. In fact, she acted as if nothing had changed at all, as if she had never left. She’s currently out bathing herself out in the living room. We’re all very happy she’s back, since I think most of us in the family had secretly given up hope that we’d ever see her again. She’s been a part of the family for over ten years, so this is big news and thus it merrits a news post. She’s in good health and we’re not letting her out of the house again for at least a week!

I know it’s been a bit since I last posted, but I’ve been busy. I don’t know where to begin, but let’s start with I love my job! The people I work with are great and we have a lotta fun with the training. So far I’ve been spending my 8-5 M-F job going over how to file bug reports, how to repsond to user emails, and playing Disney’s Toontown Online, which I actually recomend you play. It’s really fun, and you can get a few three-day trial from the link there. It’s an online masively multiplayer game where you’re a toon trying to save Toontown from a robot invasion. Give it a whirl; I’m my usual alias (Mr. Person) and I hang out in the Nuttyville district.

So the way I work is this: I’m employed by a temp agency called Personel Source; they have my placed at a company called ece (yes, it’s lowercase), which was formerly known as Software Spectrum; ece has me and 8 others working for Disney. I asked the Disney person who’s been training us all week who I can say I work for, and she said I can tell people I work for Disney, so that’s what I’m doin’. I work for Disney, and it’s a lotta fun. Doesn’t pay quite as good as Symantec tech support, but I don’t care a whit about that. Team Disney has the most fun here by far, and I actually managed to find the job of dreams: I get paid to play video games! =)

Dude, getting a job sucks. Like, when you think you’ve got a job, you’ve filled out the W-4 forms, you’ve pee’d in a cup, you’re done right? But no! Get this, Thursday afternoon I get a call from the temp agency telling me that the company I was gonna work for to do Symantec support for doesn’t want any people after all. Girr.. So anyways, the nice temp agency fixed me up with another job. After some more testing (I r0x0r3d!), I’m now set up to work for ECE doing tech support for a Disney game called Toontown. I start Monday morning. At 7:30 I go into the office and they explain the timecard to me and get me a parking pass. I work from 8:00-17:00 Monday thru Friday, and I assume the first few weeks will be mostly training stuff. I’ll try not too fall asleep as I adjust to the earlier rising time.

So yeah, I got the job. I’m very excited about this. I start work Wednesday the 20th of August, which means I’ll actually have to get up at a reasonable time again. So sad, but it’s worth it. I’ll be making decent money and I’ll finally be able to start paying off some ever-mounting bills.

To summarize, I’m working for a temp-to-permanent agency called Personel Source where I’m placed at a company called ECE, formerly called Software Spectrum. They handle all of Symantec’s technical support issues, so I’ll be a guy in a cubicle with a phone headset and a computer terminal. Woo hoo. At least I’m not doing telemarketing.

Well, to be to the point, I got a job interview tomorrow. It’s for a company called ECE (I think) that provides technical support for Symantec products. At any rate, it sounds promising, so I go interview Wednesday at 14:00. Obviously, I’ll post how it goes here. Wish me luck!

All right, kids, in an effort to maintain my sanity, I’ve begun work on the new and improved web forums for this here site. Consider the old ones toast. They stopped working and I have NO interest in reviving them. I’ve been displeased with them almost from the start. I consider the overall high-level design poor and badly thought out. I took too many unneccessary shortcuts in the name of “efficiency”, but for no real gains. This time I’m gonna have SEVERAL tables for the forums, threads, and messages, respectively, instead of just one for the messages. I’m actually drawing up ER diagrams and sketching out table structures on scraps of paper near the computer. I have a few major things to work through before I get to designing pages and a long way to go before it’s up, but I wanted to mention it so that y’all can keep me on task. Some hurdles remaining to be cleared are: figuring out how to make it so you can UPLOAD avatar images instead of just linking them; how to handle persistant variables such as who you are (username) across the entire forum; and how to make it so using the browser’s Back button doesn’t cause double posts and strange dialog boxes asking you to resubmit POSTDATA information and such junk. For the former, I’m not sure if it’s possible without a major security hole, the latter is in the nature of web forms so it may be unavoidable, and the other I’ve actually got some ideas for.

In case you can’t tell, this is how I’m keeping myself occupied while I wait for someone to call me for an interview. Even if I go around ALL DAY filling out applications and dropping off resum?s, I still have ALL EVENING/NIGHT to go crazy doing nothing. So, in an effort to fill the hours, I’ve found a much-needed hobby. Much-needed for me, and according to Kim, much-needed for you too. She said some nice things about the usefulness of the forum, so I’m gonna make a new one. A better one! It also gives me something to talk about here, rather than discuss my day like I usually do. (Today I played Final Fantasy for 3+ hours and ate food after sleeping an unholy amount.) Not so exciting, eh?

So yeah, the job hunt sucks, but thanks for asking all the same. I’m not bitter, just really, really sad/crazy/depressed/bored/lost/whatever/nyarrr/uhhh. Or something. Not that bad, really. Just something I’m not used to. I’m using to doing something! AHHHHH!!! Write me email!

Let’s see, what now? Well, nothing new on the job front so I’ll keep that part brief: rarrr, I hate job-hunting. Hire me, damnit!

In car-related news, dad and I were totally successful in replacing the shocks on my car. It runs much smoother now. Yay! As cool as that was, however, it wasn’t the largest event of last weekend…

So yeah, just to further prove how much of an enormous nerd I am, last weekend my brother Matthew and I hosted a LAN party over at dad and Estelle’s new place. It went from Friday evening until Sunday morning. For those who may not be familiar with what a LAN party is, LAN stands for Local Area Network, and basically it means we all get our computers together in one place, network them together, and play computer games all weekend. We played Counter-Strike, StarCraft, Warcraft III, Jedi Knights II: Jedi Outcast, Quake III Arena, Dance Dance Revolution, and even a little bit of Final Fantasy X. All this was a good excuse to get a bunch of friends and family together for a while before everyone splits again for the school year in a few weeks. Those in attendance for any and/or all were myself, Matthew, Kimi, Megs, Ben, Jacques, Devin, Molly, Kelly, and Justin. Many thanks to dad and Estelle for their hospitality and putting up with our insanity. It was a lot of fun.

This week my big plans are to get called back by one of the following places of possible employment: University Computing Center, SCT, Symantec, Oregon Community Credit Union, Bi-Mart, or Radio Shack. This way, I can begin working and start paying back some ever-increasing debt. Now, it’s up to these businesses to keep up their end, cuz I’ve certainly done my side of things by submitting an application and resum? and calling back. Come on now, I can’t wait all year here! 😉

So yeah. Story of my life. Nothing huge happens, but I write a lot about it anyway. And unless a company is actively hiring people exactly like me, I don’t want to hear “you should apply at Foo” from anyone. I appreciate all the help, but despite my whining, I really would rather do this alone. Believe me, I’ve considered and applied at many, many places. Just because a place does something with computers doesn’t mean they’re gonna hire me. Sorry if I sound bitter and ungrateful–I’m not–it’s just that I’m tired of all this job searching and it’s making me pissy. And yes, I know that calling places back can be a good thing, so please don’t remind me of this either. I’ve called back most of the places I’ve applied at recently, and today I got two “We’ll take your name and number and never get around to calling you back” and one “Here’s a recording that tells you to go away” for my inquirries. Rather disheartening, wouldn’t you say? Still, I’m hopeful. I feel like I’m close for some reason, like it’s only a matter of time now. The waiting is uncomfortable, but I get by.